Graham Hancock Quotes Page 2

“Archaeology is a deeply conservative discipline and I have found that archaeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be true. They run a very real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do.
In consequence they focus – perhaps to a large extent subconsciously – on evidence and arguments that don't upset the applecart. There might be room for some tinkering around the edges, some refinement of orthodox ideas, but God forbid that anything should be discovered that might seriously undermine the established paradigm.”

“Archaeology is too much constrained by a rigid reference frame of what is possible and what is not, and tends to ignore, sidestep, or ridicule evidence that challenged that reference frame.”

“As very often in our discipline, old and seemingly certain statements rest forever without further verification.”

“At Göbekli Tepe there is a creature, sculpted in high-relief, identified by Klaus Schmidt as a beast of prey with splayed claws and powerful shoulders, its tail bent to its left over its body. A very similar animal is seen at Cutimbo in Peru with the same splayed claws and the same powerful shoulders, while the tail instead of being bent to its left is bent to its right.

At both Göbekli Tepe and Cutimbo, reliefs of salamanders and of serpents are found. The style of execution in all cases is very similar. At about the level of the genitals of the so-called 'Totem Pole' of Göbekli Tepe, a small head and two arms protrude. The head has a determined look, with prominent brows. The long fingers of the hands almost meet. The posture is that of a man leaning down through the stone and playing a drum

This is also the posture of two figures at Cutimbo, who emerge from a large convex block on one of the circular towers. They have the same determined features and prominent brow ridges as the figure on the 'Totem Pole'. The two serpents on the side of the 'Totem Pole' have peculiarly large heads, making them look almost like sperm. So, too, does the serpent that emerges from the dark narrow entrance of the Temple of the Moon above Cuzco. Lions feature in the reliefs at Göbekli Tepe, pumas feature in the reliefs at Cutimbo and again the manner of representation is similar.”

“At six thousand or more years older than the stone circles of Stonehenge, the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe, like the deeply buried megaliths of Gunung Padang, mean that the timeline of history taught in our schools and universities for the best part of the last hundred years can no longer stand. It is beginning to look as though civilization, as I argued in my controversial 1995 bestseller 'Fingerprints of the Gods', is indeed much older and much more mysterious than we thought.”

“Egyptologic i.e. that special form of reasoning, with a built-in double standard, deployed only by Egyptologists.”

“Everything we’ve been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong.”

“If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization – a society that ticks all the boxes – is it not obvious that it is our own?

Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is – that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology – all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us.”

“If evidence supports established theories then that evidence will be accepted. But if evidence undermines established theories, then that evidence must be rejected.”

“It concerns the growing body of evidence that 12,800 years ago a giant comet traveling on an orbit that took it through the inner solar system broke up into multiple fragments, and that many of these fragments, some more than a mile in diameter, hit the earth.

It is believed that North America was the epicenter of the resulting cataclysm with several of the largest impacts on the North American ice cap causing floods and tidal waves and throwing a vast cloud of dust into the upper atmosphere that enshrouded the earth, preventing the sun’s rays from reaching the surface and thus initiating the sudden, mysterious global deep freeze that geologists call the Younger Dryas.”

“One could imagine that a group of anthropologists and scientists sent off to study a previously uncontacted Amazon tribe today might be bound by similar strictures – not to reproduce with natives. But suppose some of them disagreed? Suppose some of them 'went native' – as used to be said of colonialists in the days of the British Empire who allowed themselves to get too close to indigenous populations they interacted with.

Is that perhaps what happened to the troop of two hundred 'Watchers' on Mount Hermon? Somewhere around 10,900 BC, did they break the commandments of their own culture and 'go native' among the hunter-gatherers of the Near East? And were the first chance encounters with the fragments of a giant comet a century later in 10,800 BC – encounters that devastated the world--somehow blamed upon their moral lapse?”

“Professor Robert Schoch is a renowned figure, indeed notorious, for the case he’s made, based on strict geological evidence, that the Great Sphinx of Giza bears the unmistakable erosion patterns of thousands of years of heavy rainfall. This means it has to be much older than 2500 BC (the orthodox date, when Egypt received no more rain than it does today) and must originally have been carved around the end of the Ice Age when the Nile valley was subjected to a long period of intense precipitation.”

“Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, came to teach the ancient inhabitants of Mexico the benefits of settled agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a serpent, he is more often shown in human form – the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego – and is usually described as a tall bearded white man, a mysterious person, a white man with a strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes and a flowing beard.

Indeed, the attributes and life history of Quetzalcoatl are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character the memory of whose benefactions lingered after his death, and whose personality was eventually deified.

The same could very well be said of Oannes – and just like Oannes at the head of the Apkallu (likewise depicted as prominently bearded) it seems that Quetzalcoatl traveled with his own brotherhood of sages and magicians. We learn that they arrived in Mexico 'from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles', and that Quetzalcoatl was regarded as having been 'the founder of cities, the framer of laws and the teacher of the calendar'.”

“The problem at Göbekli Tepe is the pristine, sudden appearance, like Athena springing full-grown and fully armed from the brow of Zeus, of what appears to be an already seasoned civilization so accomplished that it 'invents' both agriculture and monumental architecture at the apparent moment of its birth.”

“The same solution – that Easter Island was once part of a much larger landmass – would also explain another, very different puzzle, namely the so-called Rongo Rongo script. It is unprecedented in human history for a sophisticated fully developed writing system to be invented and put into use by a small, isolated island community.
Yet Easter Island does have its own script, examples of which, mostly incised on wooden boards, copies of copies of copies of much older lost originals, were collected in the nineteenth century and have found their way into a number of museums around the world. None remain on Easter Island itself and even in the period when they were collected no native Easter Islanders were able to read them.”

“There's the pillar statue in the semi-subterranean temple at Tiahuanaco in Bolivia. Like the Totem Pole of Göbekli Tepe, it is anthropomorphic. Like the Totem Pole at Göbekli Tepe, it has serpents writhing up its side. Like the Totem Pole at Göbekli Tepe, the long fingers of its hands almost meet in front of its body.

The face is human not animal, however, and it's heavily bearded. Nonetheless, the figure of an animal is carved on the side of its head and this animal resembles no known species more closely than it does Toxodon, a sort of New World rhino that went extinct during the cataclysms at the end of the Ice Age around 12,000 years ago. This isn't pareidolia – the figure is definitely there. So there's only one question – and it's difficult to answer: is this a depiction of Toxodon, or is it some creature of the artist's imagination?”

“To be clear that in signalling the decades around 2012 as the end of a great cycle, the Maya were not speaking of the end of the world, as such, but rather of the end of an age – a time of great transformation and world rebirth – that would be followed by the beginning of a new great cycle or world age. This, in the Mayan scheme of things, is the turbulent and dangerous time of transition we live in today.

It is therefore strange, and indeed somewhat eerie, to find the solar and astronomical coordinates of the exact same 80-year window between 1960 and 2040 prophesied by the Maya to mark a turning point in human history, carved in high relief on a 12,000-year-old pillar in Göbekli Tepe in far-off Turkey.”

“Was the Younger Dryas cold event that began so suddenly and so mysteriously 12,800 years ago brought on by the effects of a large comet hitting the earth?”

“We are used to things starting out small and simple and then progressing – evolving – to become ever more complex and sophisticated, so this is naturally what we expect to find on archaeological sites. It upsets our carefully structured ideas of how civilizations should behave, how they should mature and develop, when we are confronted by a case like Göbekli Tepe that starts out perfect at the beginning and then slowly devolves until it is just a pale shadow of its former self.”

“There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are - to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either.”

“A team of Japanese engineers had recently tried to build a 35-feet-high replica of the Great Pyramid (rather smaller than the original, which was 481 feet 5 inches in height). The team started off by limiting itself strictly to techniques proved by archaeology to have been in use during the Fourth Dynasty. However, construction of the replica under these limitations turned out to be impossible and, in due course, modern earth-moving, quarrying and lifting machines were brought to the site. Still no worthwhile progress was made. Ultimately, with some embarrassment, the project had to be abandoned.”

“Failure of logic in which absence of evidence, which was one thing, was in fact being treated as evidence of absence – which was quite another.”

“Most of the so-called illegal drugs have vastly increased in use, despite billions of dollars spent suppressing them. I believe 750,000 Americans are arrested every year for possession of cannabis. I mean that's 750, 000 lives damaged by that arrest process. It's a crazy, crazy system. It's playing into the system that the hallucinogens are grouped together with addictive drugs, which they are not. But addictive or not it's our responsibility as adults to make decisions and it's not the states' right to do that, in my opinion.”

“The use of language around drugs is really important. So we find that it's increasingly difficult in our society to find the word 'drug' not connected to the word 'abuse'. The notion of a responsible use of drugs is written out in the language of our culture.”